TELEVISION

From Dean Koontz, a Mad Killer Who Looks His Prey in the Eye

By ANITA GATES

Published: August 3, 1997

''FOX'S MINI-SERIES ''INTENSITY'' begins with Patsy Cline on the radio and Mom's boyfriend's hand in the marijuana Baggie. Then he kills two neighbors just for fun. That scene isn't in Dean Koontz's 1996 novel of the same name, but Mr. Koontz contends that he is thrilled with the adaptation, because the spirit of the book has been retained.

Many would say that is a very dark spirit. In a season of increasingly horrific film and television bad guys, the villain of ''Intensity,'' to be shown Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8, may be the most frighteningly evil in a long while. Edgler Vess is a serial killer who lives for the look of terror in his victims' eyes. As he explains to two gas-station employees just before he shoots them dead, he prefers hunting to fishing because in fishing ''you can't see anything in their eyes.''

''What's the point?'' he adds.

Colin Harrison, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Vess as ''a man who eats photographs of his victims and has read too much German philosophy.'' Vess (played by John C. McGinley) also expects to be deified someday. ''If he, in fact, becomes a god,'' Mr. Koontz writes, ''the transformation will occur because he has already chosen to live like a god -- without fear, without remorse, without limits, with all his senses fiercely sharpened.''

Just knowing that such people exist ''darkens our attitude about life and about the human condition,'' said Mr. Koontz, 52. But that darkness isn't the story's spirit, he says. Instead it's the caring heroism of Chyna Shepherd (Molly Parker), who follows Vess in order to save the 15-year-old girl he has locked in his basement.

Mr. Koontz, who has had 11 books on the best-seller list in the last three years, disagrees with the notion that such behavior is unrealistic because people act only from self-interest: ''I find that an absolutely horrifying idea. I think people do selfless things all the time.'' ANITA GATES